


The Apocrypha of Yuri Potter

by CloudDreamer



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Book 5: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Canonical Child Abuse, Childhood Trauma, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Excessive Use of Symbolism, F/F, Ghosts, Ginny Gets Smart Person In The Room Rights, Headspace, Implied/Referenced Self Harm, Introjects, Non-Human Headmates, Not Canon Compliant, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Partial amnesia, Spiders, Stimming, The Anti JK Rowling Manifesto, Trans Harry Potter, Written by a system, headmates
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-23
Updated: 2020-09-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:54:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26071480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CloudDreamer/pseuds/CloudDreamer
Summary: The Boy Who Lived is coming apart at the seams, and through those holes peaks the beginning of something beautiful.
Relationships: Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley, Sirius Black & Harry Potter, Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Comments: 13
Kudos: 53





	1. The Cupboard

**Author's Note:**

> TWs: Disassociation, picking at nails as a harmful stim, unintention pluralphobia, spider imagery, referenced child abuse (canon typical)

It starts at #12 Grimmauld Place. 

He’s looking in the mirror in the bathroom and his eyes glance up to the charmed sheet of paper. One moment ago, it scribbled out the hour as two in the afternoon. Now it’s three, and someone’s knocking at the door. And he feels as if his scar should hurt, but it doesn’t. 

All the other symptoms are there. The faint fogginess. The disconnect between him and his body, as if he should be somewhere else. The spindly Lichtenberg Figure that stretches across most of his forehead should be screaming right now. But it’s not.

And he looks different, in a way he can’t seem to put a finger on. His pale green eyes look strange, against his darker skin. His hair seems longer than it was just moments before and smoother. Like he’d brushed it. Loe and behold, the old dusty hairbrush with the Black family crest engraved on its handle is out from one of the drawers. It’s fallen into the sink. His hand is up against the mirror, fingers pushing hard like he was trying to crack it. That doesn’t make much sense. 

“do you mean by that, Harry?” 

He spins to the door, quickly forgetting about the brush, the strangeness in the mirror, the now dissipating fog. That’s Sirius at the door. He’s angry? He swallows, bracing at the tone. Sirius has been restless, but he hasn’t been angry. Not at Harry. The knocks on the door are getting more urgent, and he’s not sure how he knew he’s been hearing them. 

**“Don’t let him in.”**

The thought is sudden, and it doesn’t sound like his own voice. He looks up to see the cobwebs in this old dusty bathroom, half expecting a spider to come crawling. There’s another room he stands in at the same time, all wrapped up in those beautiful patterns, lines of silk, each so weak and each so strong, and there’s someone at the center of those webs. But he blinks it away, closes his eyes, and reaches for the old lock. Turns the door. 

Sirius vibrates with too much energy. He’s fully human, but that something behind Harry’s eyes recognizes the black dog in his shaggy hair, in the too-soft line of his jaw, in the fierce shine in his eyes. 

“What do I mean by what?” Harry asks, and he stifles the impulse to slam the door back shut, to slink away from the larger creature, to the safety of the webs and the dust. 

“You—“ he begins, with a strange tension in the words, before he looks Harry up and down. He exhales. The anger drains. “Harry Potter.” 

“So everyone says,” he says, grinning as best as he can to cover up the fear that's not quite gone, that will never be gone, and shoving his hands back into pockets. His frame feels slight, all of a sudden, like he’s just shrunk. “What did I mean by what?”

“You don’t remember?” 

He shakes his head. Shrugs.

“I’ve got a pretty bad memory. Ask Hermione.” 

“That’s not a bad memory. That was— you were saying how I was a threat to the girl.” 

He shrugs again, and now Sirius looks too big. He doesn’t grow, and Harry doesn’t shrink. But he’s a ghost in his own body, and what’s in his body in something tiny. Four sets of bright red eyes stare past him, into Sirius. Uncompromising, venomous, prepared to defend. 

“Weird.” 

He steps forward, as if to push Sirius out of the way. 

“You’re just going to leave it at that?”

“Sometimes things just happen.” 

Sirius looks at Harry like he’s crazy, which makes Harry wonder. Nobody at Hogwarts ever hassled him much about his missing time, except Snape, who used it as an excuse to take points away from Griffindor if anyone brought it up, and Hermione, who complained when he asked her to explain something he’d missed in class when they’d allegedly been having quite a thorough conversation about the subject matter earlier. 

“Harry, I’ve been trying to convince you to let me in for a good fifteen minutes, and you’ve been calling me a murderer.” 

He looks at his nails. They’re short again, and the skin around them is picked raw. Maybe even a bit bloody. That hasn’t happened for as long as he’s been here. He really hasn’t lost that much time either, comparatively. It’s always worse at #4 Privet Drive or in certain classes. Or if he’s been around Malfoy lately. It was really bad this Summer, after Cedric died. He’d start from it only to find himself making a mess in his closet, rearranging things on end to fit some pattern he couldn’t remember. 

“This just happens sometimes.” 

Sirius reaches out, maybe to take his hand reassuringly, and Harry is gone again. Or, he’s not gone entirely. He’s standing there, and he’s listening. He’s listening as something else parts his lips. He’s standing in that room again, in his mind’s eye, only there’s someone else in front of him now. And she’s different. The same as the spider, but different too. She’s pale, deathly so. He can’t process that much, and he’s sure he won’t remember this. Her words are almost a whisper. 

“she cannot know about us, mister black.”

“Us? Harry, what’s going on?”

But Harry isn’t there. He closes his eyes, hands over his head. There are flowers poking through the rotten boards behind her feet, and they are all lilies. 

“miss potter is not quite what she believes herself to be. she holds many secrets, mister black, secrets she must not face.”

“Miss Potter? Who are you?”

“she is a garden in a graveyard covered in webs, and i am the ghost of the girl who did not live. the spider does not know you, and they do not trust you,” and she smiles, holding the hands of the body up to show she means no ill will. "they do not remember your kindness. all they know is the stories they were told."

She examines those hands. Her sweet spider, her Lycoris, has done a number on the nails. She tsks internally and frowns as she realizes she did not insist on packing the bandaids she stole over this summer. The Order of the Phoenix had arrived so quickly. The only one of these strange figures who shared this body allowed to make any choices on that matter was Harry, and Harry was so slow to take care of the body. 

“What the hell do you mean? Are you saying he's possessed? Harry isn’t a girl.” 

“mister black, you do not know your goddaughter as well as you believe you do.” 

That is an understatement. A less formed, unnamed someone laughs at that.

“I have to tell the others." Sirius reaches for his wand with one hand, raising the other, gesturing at what he believes to be Harry Potter and only Harry Potter's body to back up. 

And she steps back, but not outside, her pale white hair cascading over her white night gown. She steps back through an open door, into the outside, and it’s night. The lilies that were only beginning to peak up inside run wild. It takes a moment for Harry to realize there are graves, and he turns to follow her, trying to understand. Somehow, she’s gold and black and white at the same time. A scarf trails behind her and she’s gone. And he’s back. And he doesn’t understand why Sirius is giving him that concerned look. 

“It’s fine. This happens all the time. Ron says Ginny knows a girl in Ravenclaw who does the same thing. Acts a bit weird for a bit, doesn’t remember what happened,” he continues, as if there hadn't been a pause at all. He doesn't understand why Sirius looks afraid now. "What? Did I do it again?" 

“Harry, you're possessed by a ghost.”

“A ghost? That’s new,” he says, and he puts his hands back in his pockets. “Usually people say I act like a real git for a while, talk about webs a lot. It annoys Hermione because it gets really bad in Potions and Snape docks so many points for shit I don’t even remember, and she has to teach me the lesson again.”

“Harry, do you really think this is normal?”

And the look in Sirius’s eyes is something Harry cannot seem to hide from. Not anymore. Not like he could hide from his own gaze in the mirror, the gaze that seemed like it was coming from behind him, inside him. He opens his mouth to say something, before he closes it again. Hair that's too long, too well brushed for a boy like him falls into his face, and he reaches to push it out of the way with nails too short. Nails that he'd once found painted.

-

No, it starts like this. 

There is a child in the cupboard at #4 Privet Drive. They are small, and they are scared. They stare at the ceiling for hours on end, feeling the walls closing in. The hours pass in a haze, because there is nothing to do but listen to parents that aren’t theirs scream at each other and pretend things are okay. Things are not okay, but when they scream at each other, they do not scream at them.

There is only one constant companion.They look up to the ceiling of their little cupboard, and the little spider crawls through their webs. Where the child is small because they are not fed enough, the spider is small because it is meant to be. The spider feeds on the mosquitos that come one summer, making the child itch, and the child gives the spider a dozen different names they’re quick to forget.  
And one night, or maybe every night, when the child is too scared to go on, they look at the spider. They ask for help, whispering won’t it please someone protect them from more than the bites. 

And one morning, or maybe every morning, there is a spider who helps them stand. There is a spider that helps the child run when all they think they can do is freeze. It is not the same spider that they stared at so longingly. That would be ridiculous, even in this world of magic and mystery that the child cannot begin to comprehend. 

And one day, or maybe every day, they are less alone. They are less afraid. And the horror fades into a dark haze the child can barely reach, because the spider and all of their kind that followed locked it away. They do not want to return to that house, with its creaking floorboards and a family that refuses to be a family, but they do not live in terror, because the spider will not let them. 

The spider is only the first of many, and although they shy away from the light for years and years, they will not stay in the shadows forever. 

Look: they are about to step into the spotlight.


	2. The Endless Garden

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TWs: Unintentional/ignorant pluralphobia, "feeling crazy," disassociation, trauma responses, JK Rowling's worldbuilding and the implications therein. 
> 
> Also, I know mental healthcare in our world in the years that Harry Potter came out was pretty shitty and I'm not sure when the term DID came into existence but shhhhhh. It's our fanfic and we get to pick the level of awareness.

There is something wrong with him. 

It’s a truth that’s been staring him in the face for a long time. He can see it now. Or maybe he could always see it and just didn’t want to. Notes he didn’t remember taking, scrawled in the margins, people he didn’t know treating him like a friend— but he’d always assumed that was because he was The Boy Who Lived. Ginny’s double take every time he let her know he’d lost time— had she known? He sits cross legged in the room. 

His eyes are closed. 

His head hurts but not from his scar. He knows those aches are different now. The adults are discussing him again, and they’ve even invited most of the other kids along. They’ll be going over everything he’s said, analyzing him like he’s some sort of freak. His first thought is, crazy. All the newspapers were right about him being unstable, that his claims about the return of Voldemort were just another delusion. 

They’ll need to lock him up, and how will he beat the Dark Lord in a mental asylum? That’s what the Durseleys always said, that the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. But Sirius had said possession, had said ghosts, and surely, that’s better. A ghost can be removed, and he wants this removed. Right? 

The idea prompts some resistance, but he doesn’t know if it’s his. He can’t trust any of his own feelings. He feels like he’s pushing through years of cobwebs, memories and thoughts covered by time, and then he realizes it’s not time. 

It’s something else. It’s someone else. Someone hanging by a thread, matching his two eyes concealed by a mop of messy hair with eight beady red ones. He steps backwards, even though he didn’t realize he was standing. He isn’t. His body is still on the bed, at the same time, in his minds eye, he bumps up against a wall. Things shudder, moving and falling around him, and someone reaches out to catch them. She takes his shattered glasses first— he reaches up to his face to feel them in the real world and they’re still there. Then a still sealed envelope, a partially unwrapped package, a book in a language he can’t read, a thousand different coins.

And she’s gone, the objects on the floor, in between the flowers. Leaving only the spider dangling before him. They’re familiar, somehow, but Harry can’t figure out why. All of them are so familiar, but so alien too. It’s like seeing his family in the Mirror of Erised. 

“Who are you?” he asks, and his own voice, but different, somehow, answers him. Out loud. 

“Lycoris.” 

He thinks of a book he read for Potions once. He realizes that’s the book that’s lying on the floor, that the book has always been _On Floral Brewing Volume VII: Lilium._ He reaches for it, and his hand passes through it. He looks back up and sees a twenty something year old standing where the spider was. He knows they're Lycoris again, knows it like he knows his own name. 

They’re not quite human, not entirely. They’re short and far too skinny, like an exaggeration of their eight year old self, but with an intelligence that doesn’t match the young appearance. Their eyes cross their face, the same as in their spider form, and their ears are sharp. Their hair is a pale brown orange, a little bit like a Weasley, but not like any of them in particular, more like a strange merger of all of them at once. Their skin is chalky, and the disparate parts combine to make a disconcerting image. Or, it should be disconcerting, but the more he looks at them, the more he starts to recognize.

They wear a shirt that’s far too big for them with the colours of Vernon’s favorite sports team emblazoned across it. The shirt hangs off their shoulders, despite the knot someone — he knows it’s the dead girl from earlier, somehow— tied around their chest. Their leggings are black, and they don’t wear shoes. When they open their mouth, Harry sees teeth, and he inhales sharply. It’s just his imagination. He closes his eyes and focuses on things in the room. That’s a tip Hermione gave him a while ago. Find five things. Then four different things. Then three, and so on. Apparently one of her mothers had panic attacks when work got too much. 

**“Not again,”** Lycoris says, tensing up their shoulders, but this time, it’s internal. His mouth doesn’t move. He tightens his grip. If there wasn’t a charm on the door, he’d get up to go to the bathroom and run water over his face. Maybe that would make the ghost or demon go away. 

If he ignores it, then the ghost demon will go away. He decides this is sensible. 

And he feels like he’s been hit. He gasps for breath at the wave of emotion. Betrayal. Hurt. Like his entire existence has been meaningless. All of a sudden, it’s gone, and if he lets himself imagine that strange place again, there’s nothing but empty webs and scattered objects between flowers. He crouches down to look at them, and he realizes one of the types from before— the spider lilies— are wilting. And some haven’t bloomed yet.

There’s a knock at the door. He yelps and looks around the real room, like he’s being doing something shameful. Like he needs something to hide beneath, somewhere to hide. 

“Who is it?” 

“Ginny! Can I come in?” she hollers.

“I don’t know, can you?” He pauses a moment. “That’s an actual question, not a snarky comment.”

“I figured!” 

She tests the door and finds it opens for her. The portrait is hollering somewhere in the distance, only now audible, and Harry catches a quick glimpse of Lycoris down distant hallways giving her the middle finger. Ginny shuts the door behind her quickly. 

“So, what’s the verdict?” 

She looks a little confused for a moment, looking him up and down, as if searching for something. She doesn’t find it, but she takes a seat right up against the end of the bed anyway, her feet on the ground.

“Harry, yes?”

“Who else would it be?” he asks, for what feels like the hundred thousandth time, but it’s not a joke anymore. He scoots a bit to the side to make room for her closer, but she doesn’t move much. Her hair is short now, courtesy of Fred or George earlier that summer. Apparently she’d actually asked for it, though their mother hadn’t believed her at first. She wears a denim jacket with its sleeves shorn off, several patches he doesn’t recognize sewn on. When he’d asked about it earlier, she’d said something about some old muggle book she’d read, but that Harry wouldn’t get it ‘right then.’

There’s a warmth in his chest at that, like a dozen whispered conversations, stolen moments, but he doesn’t remember any of them. Lost time again. 

“Couple of options,” she says, like she doesn’t realize it’s a joke. She never seems to, he notes. “I thought you knew now. They said they were going to be more open this year.”

“Knew what? And who? You know my delusion and slash or other, non-Voldemort related demon that’s also stuck in my head?”

Ginny laughs like that’s the funniest thing she’s ever heard. She even forgets to flinch at the mention of Voldemort’s name. Her laugh isn’t like wind chimes, and it’s not small like it used to be. She’s gotten so much bigger, so much louder, and he’s struck by how pretty she is, captured in the light like this. He doesn’t know if he wants to be her or lean in and kiss her. 

**“Both,”** a voice that isn’t his offers, inside his head.

“What’s funny?” 

“This is what they’re so worked up about? Really? I thought we had a problem.” 

He practically scrambles off the side of the bed, getting to his feet. What does she mean by that? A part of him wants to laugh with her, but that part’s quiet, sitting in a train station to no where, guarding something important. Something that nobody can see, not yet. The last secret. 

“What do you mean by that?” 

“You’re not crazy, and you’re not possessed. Ugh, I can’t believe I’ve been such an idiot all these years.”

She facepalms, and he notices a ring on her right middle finger. When had she started wearing that? One of the patches was purple, black, gray, and white, while the other was these pretty shades of orange and pink. 

“You better explain quickly.” 

“Look, there are some things the Wizarding world is really stupid about,” she says calmly, like she’s explaining something to a child. He certainly feels like a child. “I really thought this was normal. Our schooling system is absolutely atrocious, Harry.” 

“What things?” he practically shouts at her. She just rolls her eyes. 

“You know how I lost it a couple of years ago? After the diary thing?” 

He shakes his head, asks, hesitantly, “he was still giving you trouble?”

“No, I had trauma. Have trauma, really, that doesn’t just go away. You didn’t notice I was gone for most of last year?” Now he feels like a jerk. He shakes his head slowly. Too preoccupied with the Goblet of Fire and everything that came after it. At least, that's what he assumes. He reaches out for the memories he knows are supposed to be there but-- 

**"No."**

“It’s fine. Most people didn’t see any of the mental breakdown either. They all blamed it on magic causes. You know the only mental health facilities for wizards are basically prisons? It’s not like that in the muggle world.”

“Really?” He wonders how she knows this, when he didn’t. He’s the muggleborn, after all, and she’s been raised in the Wizarding world. It’s kind of embarrassing, how much she knows.

“Whoever invented the Statute of Secrecy was either an idiot or downright evil. Yes, really. They were about to give up on me, lock me up. when Dad suggested we look into muggle causes. Everyone made fun of him, but like… he was right.”

“So what, you’re saying I have trauma? What from?” She looks at him flatly, and he shoves his hand into his pockets. 

“Was that a stupid question?” 

“It’s fine,” she says, and it’s clear from how brusk she’s being that she’s not actually fine. “You’ve repressed most of it, I assume. Yes, you do. No, that doesn’t mean you’re crazy. Crazy is a terrible word, anyway, it means nothing and just stigmatizes neurodivergence.”

She looks to the side and shakes her head. 

“I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.” 

“Sorry, sorry, getting to the point. And the point is, muggles have words for stuff that brains do because they don’t just throw spells at problems until something breaks. Post traumatic stress disorder, autism, a bad case of the genders, thank you, Feinberg—“ she points at herself, and then at Harry. “—and just spitballing here, dissociative identity disorder. Or one of the OSSDs, maybe? Probably the former and the latter too, but I’m not an expert.” 

“You sure sound like it,” he says.

“No, I’m really not.”

“That was a joke.” 

She nods, like she only now gets it, and gets to her feet with a determined expression.

“Right. I need to go tell the others they can stop panicking.” His eyes widen. 

“You can’t just leave me with half of an explanation!” 

“Yes, I can. They’re going to call in the big guns if I don’t soon, and you guys will be in a whole bigger world of trouble if they decide to try to exorcise you or something dumb like that.” 

She closes the door delicately behind her, and Harry is left to sit. And now she’s gone, he feels the edges of that place reaching out for him again. He can’t literally see it, can’t step forward and hardly notice the objects have returned to their previous places, can’t realize there’s something different about the body in this place as she exists the tiny cupboard.

The field of flowers and graves seem to stretch on forever. There’s no sky, nothing but a blank void Harry feels like she might fall into at any time. She’s not wearing any shoes here, she notices, as she looks down. She doesn’t quite feel the flowers on her actual skin, but there’s something there. A reassurance. 

She’s not sure how long she stands, right outside the door, trying to decide what to do, before she sees the flicker of the ghost. She doesn’t stop to think before she starts to chase her. It’s a slow start, one foot at a time, but soon enough she’s running. She knows instinctively whether to put her feet to avoid the graves and the scattered skeletons in varying states of disarray. 

And before she knows it, despite never seeing it approach on the horizon, she’s in front of a massive hedge maze. Walls tower above her, braided with roses thick with thorns. A massive tower stretches up from what has to be the center of the maze. It’s almost like Hogwarts, but the colours are wrong in a way she can’t put her finger on. Harry searches for the entrance to the shrubbery, finding it soon as she turns her mind to the task, almost feeling his body standing and reaching for some ink and parchment he’d left on the bedside table, but she’s blocked from entry.

 **“I need to see her,”** she says without opening his mouth. 

Someone shakes her head. No. Denied entry. Can’t. 

At the end of last year. When something happened at the Tri Wizard Tournament, and she’d returned with two certainties: Cedric Digory was dead, and Voldemort was back. She’d spent what felt like hours wandering the fields that hadn’t yet been filled with graves when someone else stepped in and fought for her, and— Harry had died, hadn’t she? 

He sucks in a breath, and he’s back in the body, a note waiting for him. Written in the handwriting he’d find on the margins, in so much clearer detail than his own work, but somehow childlike at the same time. He knows it’s Lycoris’s now. Not by instinct, but by the scrawled doodle inside the message. 

_Please don’t hate her. Don’t hate— and then a crude drawing of a spider._

He hasn’t spent that much time with Ginny. He’s sure of it, except for all the times last year he’d find himself looking where she’d just gone, at the end of lost time. Or the letters from her Hedwig would deliver that always seemed meant for someone else, but he never got rid of for some reason. He never read them either, but he’d always find them left in neat piles. He assumed it was someone else in the dorm tidying up for him. 

Now, he’s not sure what to think. Ginny says he isn’t crazy in the same breath she says he has a mental disorder. What’s that supposed to mean?

He just looks at his hands. Remembers finding bandaids in bright pink and green gently applied over the summer. Remembers a soft voice. Almost his mother’s, though he’s not sure why he thinks that. The voice had the same hollow quality he associated with the ghosts of Hogwarts.

Sirius is the next to come find him. He doesn’t knock like Ginny did, but he does warn Harry he’s coming in. Giving him time to stand up from where he’s sitting, knees his chest, by the side of the bed, clutching the note tight. 

Harry doesn’t respond to his, “Hello,” not at first. Not until he comes over and kneels in front of Harry.

“Harry?”

He nods.

“Think so. Apparently that’s debatable these days,” he says, and he tries to laugh, but it comes out as a muffled sob. He shoves the parchment into a pocket in the robes he’s worn a thousand times that somehow don’t seem to fit him anymore. “What did Ginny say?”

“I didn’t follow most of it,” Sirius admits, sheepishly. “Your friends seemed to get it, though. Ron says to tell you that you’re ‘bloody brilliant,’ by the way, and he’s sorry ‘my sister is a twat.’” 

He shakes his head, smiling a bit. 

“Tell him I say thank you? And that she’s fine. It’s me that’s the idiot.” 

“No, I‘m most certainly not doing that,” Sirius says, putting one hand up in a ‘stop’ gesture. His face is kind, certainly nothing like what Harry had once seen in the mirror. “One message was enough. Tell him yourself, at dinner.”

“Are you kidding? I’m never leaving my room again. I’ve got some sort of disorder, which isn’t the same thing as being crazy, except for the part where it kind of sounds like I’m crazy.” 

“I’m far from qualified to judge your mental health,” he says, chuckling a bit to himself at a joke Harry doesn’t quite get. “I don’t think any of us are. You’ve been thrown into the second coming of a war that good people more than twice your age didn’t walk away from. If you’ve got some sort of muggle defense mechanism that lets other people take charge when you can’t, I’d say that’s a good thing.” 

Harry looks up at Sirius, uncertain. 

“Other people?” 

“It sounded a lot like possession to me, but she was very clear that they aren’t coming from outside. Earlier…” 

Sirius trails off. 

“I’m sorry,” Harry says. “I’m really sorry.”

He reaches out, as if to touch Harry’s shoulder, but he hesitates, waiting for something from him. It takes a second for him to realize and nod, leaning into the touch. 

“Don't be, Harry,” Sirius says, and Harry wonders how he ever feared this man. He’s restless, sure, but it’s a fierce protective sort of restless. He doesn’t want to be out because he’s tired of these people, he wants to fight to protect them. “I’m not mad.” 

Harry gives him a flat look. 

“I’m not mad _at you._ ,” he clarifies. “Any of you. I’m mad that the world is this way, that your mind had to do this to protect itself. Hell, I’m mad at Dumbledore and the rest of the adults around here. Maybe I’m mad at the whole damn wizarding world. But not you, Harry, never at you.” 

Harry doesn't have anything to say. He just looks at Sirius and wonders how he ever-- how any part of him still-- thinks of him as a danger. He's nothing but safety now. 

They stay like that for a good while.


	3. The Tower

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: More internalized pluralphobia and arguments.

Things don’t change all at once.

Maybe that’s reassuring or maybe it’s terrifying, that this is his new normal. Most of the others are careful around him, for the next couple of days, like they were where he’d first arrived, but Ginny is more relaxed and more open than ever.  
Somehow, that manages to be even more disconcerting than the people tiptoeing around him like a powder keg about to explode. 

Hermione insists on giving him one of her notebooks to try to communicate better, which she presents as a massive sacrifice, even though he didn’t actually ask. Ron elbows her like everything is normal, makes a smartass comment, and Harry laughs while Hermione scowls, and then everything _is_ normal. And Hermione blushes, pushes her dark hair out of her face, and touches his hand and says,

“Really, if you need anything, just tell me,” and then everything is weird again. 

But he sits, back against his bed, knees holding up the notebook, open to the first blank page— she said she’d copied over the notes she’d taken on the first ten — and a quill between his fingers. He passes it from hand to hand, the white emptiness almost overwhelming. He doesn’t know where to start, and he doesn’t know how long he spends just staring at the page before he realizes he’s been writing. Or, someone has. 

_Just get it over with._

He nearly jumps out of his skin, startled at the words. He’s reminded of the diary, a comparison that makes his blood run cold. He knows this has to be different, doesn’t he? He’s not going to end up— and another blank. All he has is the edges. A basilisk. The ghost of Tom Riddle. Ginny in danger. Fawkes and the sword. There was a sword, wasn’t there? 

A sword lodged in a stone, in the bottom of an ancient chamber. Fawkes sits on the hilt, looking at him expectantly, but the door slams shut just as she reaches to step inside. The someone again. She can’t quite tell if the someone is the same as the ghost or a separate but related force yet. 

He looks back down at the page. The first message is scribbled out with faint scratchy lines, and another one is added, directly beneath it. The words are sloppy and the letters too close together, like the author doesn’t have much practice. _she is not ready yet, my sweet spider._

He frowns but starts a message of his own. Familiar lettering. 

_Excuse me, but I think I have the right to know what’s going on in my own head? What in the blazes_

He drops the quill as Hermione comes in, a little exasperated at the interruption. She’s more than a little winded, and Ron is right behind her. Outside, there’s a bit of scuffle, and he hears the edges of a “conversation” between Tonks and Sirius’s mum that was going about as well as any “conversation” with Sirius’s mum went.

“Prefect announcements came in!” 

“Oh?” Harry says, grateful for the distraction. He shuts the book before his own ink dries, letting it smear against the inside of the cover. “Who?”

“Neville, can you believe it? And Lavender Brown for the girls.” 

“Really?” Harry raises an eyebrow, adjusting his posture. “I would’ve thought you’d be a shoe-in.” 

She makes a face, and Ron slips in behind her, a wicked grin.

“That’s what you get for hanging out with a couple of trouble makers like us!” Ron says, and she glowers at him. “We’ve ruined your perfect reputation forever.” 

“Oh, don’t be such a git,” she says. “You or Harry should’ve got it too. We’ve only been snubbed because Dumbledore likes him—“ she stumbles for a moment, looking at him for too long before correcting to, “them, and he doesn’t want to show favoritism.” 

“Dumbledore doesn’t like me,” Harry says, rolling his eyes, doing his best to ignore the feeling that seizes up in his chest at the awkward pause, followed by the immense relief at the plural pronoun. Or maybe it was the lack of a he that made a knot he hadn’t realized was there slacken. “And I’m certainly not a favorite.”

“He likes you more than he likes the rest of us, anyway,” Ron retorts. 

“If he did, he’d be here. Barely looked at me in the trial. Now it turns out I’m a nutter, and he still won’t show.” 

“You’re not a nutter,” Hermione says, giving him that same worried look he recognizes from class— like she’s puzzling over a particularly tough question. She tilts her head to look at Ron, who just shrugs. Frustration surges up from where he’s been burying it— do they really need to do this _again_?

“Stop doing that,” he says, and the words come out a lot meaner than he means them to. “Stop worrying about me! Stop treating me like I’m fragile. Nothing’s bloody changed, okay? I’m still me!”

“We weren’t—“ Ron begins, before he catches Hermione shaking her head desperately. “Okay, maybe we were. Can you blame us, though?” 

Hermione facepalms at that last bit.

“Yes? The only person who’s been treating me like, well, a flipping person is Ginny, and that’s just because she’s all buddy buddy with one of my alter egos. What do you think you’re going to do, break me? I’m clearly already broken, so there’s no point to worrying!” 

“I’m sorry,” Hermione begins. “We didn’t want to hurt you by saying something ignorant.”

“Of course I’m hurt by you guys abandoning me. Ignorant? We’re all ignorant. We’re in a war, and I’m apparently half a dozen soldiers at once. Everyone is depending on me but they won’t even talk to me because they can’t trust me to be able to handle it. They couldn’t trust me before when I was just a teenager, and they especially can’t now. What if one of these alter egos is evil? What if one of them wants to support Voldemort— stop making that face— or some bloody horrible idea like that? That’s what everything’s thinking about me, isn’t it? And they won’t tell me because they’re scared it’ll wake that dark evil me up so she can go murder people.” 

His face is red by the time he’s done, and he’s out of breath too. 

“No! Of course not!” Hermione tries to reassure him. 

“Then what?” 

He should’ve just accepted the non-answer. Hollow reassurances would be better than seeing them fail to come up with an answer. They’re too ashamed to look at each other now, and his embarrassment at having pushed them so far is met with a nudge in the back of his head that says— **no, you’re right.**

He has to break the long pause himself. 

“I’m scared, okay? And I can’t do this alone. Maybe you’ll be ignorant, but so am I. So is everyone, right?” Ron nods first, Hermione taking a bit longer. He wants to believe himself as he says, “Nothing’s changed. I’m still me.” 

**There’s just more of you.**

“There’s just more of me,” he adds. Internally, he responds with a, **thank you…?**

 **You’re welcome,** they reply, and he recognizes Lycoris’s mental voice now. A little higher than his own, he wants to say, or maybe a bit firmer? It’s hard to articulate. **Thank you too.**

**For?**

**Acknowledging me.**

“Well,” Ron says. “It can’t be any more complicated than having older brothers, can it?” 

Harry laughs, and he feels Lycoris laughing too. A spider laughing is a sight to behold, as much as he can behold it. They nearly fall off the silk strand they’ve been spinning. 

“Does this mean I can ask questions now?” Hermione is clearly trying to hold back a massive grin, and that makes them laugh harder.   
**What were we so scared of?** Harry asks, and somehow, despite being in the form of a spider, Lycoris manages to make an, _are you kidding me_ expression.

“As long as you know I probably won’t have the answers to most of them, sure.”

**And say we reserve the right to tell her to fuck off.**

“And we reserve the right to not answer,” Harry translates somewhat more diplomatically. He doesn’t even realize he’s said we until a couple seconds after the pronoun escaped his lips, and he doesn’t even want to take it back. 

“Fantastic!” 

The smile she was trying to hide bursts onto her face like the sun. She bounces up and down, flapping her hands in an expression of pure joy. 

“First question,” Ron interrupts, before she can go into the diatribe that her happy flapping usually precedes, “group hug?”

“Group hug,” Harry agrees, and Hermione’s practically already grabbing the three of them. Two of them? 

**Three of us.**

**For now.**

—

After Harry admits that he’s not sure how to start the journal, Hermione offers to write in some basic questions and an introduction to the Wizarding World. He lets her, grateful. The last question she asks before she starts scribbling away is how he wants to be referred to collectively, for the interim. He doesn’t have an answer. He’s too caught up on the suggestion of interim, of there being a later when he’s better able to communicate with the others. That there are others, who’d have their own opinions. He shakes his head and tells her to come up with one herself.

“How about the Weasleys?” Ron suggests. 

“No,” Lycoris says, their voice a strange echo of what Harry heard in his own head. 

“No,” Harry confirms. “Wait.” 

“For?” Hermione asks, knitting her eyebrows together. 

“You did the thing!” Ron points out. “He did the thing, Hermione.” 

Harry shrugs, blushing a bit, and pulling himself inwards. It’s not that he’s ashamed as much as he doesn’t know what words to use for it. One moment, he knew what he was doing and saying, the next, he didn’t. And then he did again. It’s happened a thousand times, but… 

**Most people don’t do this. **Lycoris observes.****

****“Oh!” She looks him up and down, trying to find a hint of the moment. But it’s passed. Harry is himself again. “And you are?”** **

****Harry shakes his head, or he tries to. But he’s distracted now, by the other world he keeps seeing flashes of when the others speak. He kind of wants to see what else is there. And Lycoris is already here. Can they step in?** **

******Sure,** they say, and they uncurl. She always wants to make herself small. It’s funny, then, that Lycoris is the small one, should be the size of o child, but their posture is wider. It’s always strange, when they realize they’re out here, and the body is wrong. Inflexible. The vision is so terrible. They reach up and adjust the glasses. ** **

****“There it is again!” Ron says.** **

****“Lycoris, at your service. This isn’t our first meeting, Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley, but the first you’ve been aware of. Now, would you mind explaining why the fuck she’s been referring to convicted mass murderer and highly dangerous Death Eater Sirius Black as her godfather?”** **

****“Did you just— swear?” Hermione asks, like that’s the most important part of what they just asked. They roll these eyes. Blue green.** **

****“Who’s she?” Ron asks.** **

****“Yes, and by she, I mean the Girl Who Lived. Harry Potter. The lady who’s body we share.”** **

****“Harry is a boy,” Ron says. He’s crouched on his knees, and he looks a bit uncertain. The friendly rhythm Harry, him, and Hermione had just reestablished seems gone. They frown, and it feels wrong on this face, with these muscles. “Right?”** **

****“She believes she is. But I reiterate my question. Sirius Black. Murderer. Here. Why?”** **

****“Did you miss the memo about Pettigrew or something?” Ron looks confused. They can’t figure out why. Some of this setup makes sense. Some of it doesn’t. They want to reach for their wand. They always feel safer with magic at their disposal, but they know they can’t. They don’t know why, but Harry believes it so strongly. Every time they consider it, she practically surges back into control. So they don’t.** **

****“The wizard he murdered so callously all those years ago?”** **

****“Peter was the Death Eater. Not Sirius,” Hermione explains, thoughtfully. “Ginny said there would be gaps in memory, things that only some of you knew, but I didn’t think it would be that big.”** **

****Lycoris’s head is spinning. That doesn’t make any sense. They pick at the nails again, thoughtlessly but with a direction.  
“That certainly explains quite a bit. Seems a tad bit convenient, though.”** **

****“Convenient? Mate, we didn’t nearly get killed with some time travel nonsense for you to call it convenient.”** **

****“Time travel?” They look at Hermione, make a couple of connections. “Oh! That’s how you attended all those classes, third year. I’ve been wondering about that for ages. Could never think of a way to ask, especially since she seemed to know it already.”** **

****“I— yeah. Time turner.”** **

****“Sounds complicated,” they shrug. “Well. That makes me feel a lot better. Did he say how he get out of Azkaban?”** **

****“Animagus. All of his friend group was. Peter too— he was Scabbers!” Ron still looks dismayed at that. “I still can’t believe that bit.”** **

****“His friend group? Harry’s father too?”** **

****“Your father too,” Hermione cuts in.** **

****“No,” they respond, simply. “He’s not.”** **

****Lycoris doesn’t like the pause that follows. Two sets of eyes on them. Scrutinizing every expression. Just like Harry, except not in X, Y, and Z ways. Enough of this, they decide, and they gesture at Hermione to hand over the journal.** **

****“What?” she asks, still a bit stunned by the pronouncement.** **

****“Give me the notebook. I’ll do the intro.”** **


End file.
